2nd Version Date : 19/06/2007 TAXONOMY DIRECTED FOLKSONOMIES Integrating user tagging and controlled vocabularies for Australian education networks Sarah Hayman and Nick Lothian education.au Adelaide Australia Meeting: 157 Classification and Indexing Simultaneous Interpretation: No WORLD LIBRARY AND INFORMATION CONGRESS: 73RD IFLA GENERAL CONFERENCE AND COUNCIL 19-23 August 2007, Durban, South Africa http://www.ifla.org/iv/ifla73/index.htm 1 Abstract What is the role of controlled vocabulary in a Web 2.0 world? Can we have the best of both worlds: balancing folksonomies and controlled vocabularies to help communities of users find and share information and resources most relevant to them? education.au develops and manages Australian online services for education and training. Its goal is to bring people, learning and technology together. education.au projects are increasingly involved in exploring the use of Web 2.0 developments building on user ideas, knowledge and experience, and how these might be integrated with existing information management systems. This paper presents work being undertaken in this area, particularly in relation to controlled vocabularies, and discusses the challenges faced. Education Network Australia (edna) is a leading online resource collection and collaborative network for education, with an extensive repository of selected educational resources with metadata created by educators and information specialists. It uses controlled vocabularies for metadata creation and searching, where users receive suggested related terms from an education thesaurus, with their results. We recognise that no formal thesaurus can keep pace with user needs so are interested in exploiting the power of folksonomies. We describe a proof of concept project to develop community contributions to managing information and resources, using Taxonomy-Directed Folksonomy. An established taxonomy from the Australian education sector suggests terms for tagging and users can suggest terms. Importantly, the folksonomy will feed back into the taxonomy showing gaps in coverage and helping us to monitor new terms and usage to improve and develop our formal taxonomies. This model would initially sit alongside the current edna repositories, tools and services but will give us valuable user contributed resources as well as information about how users manage resources. Observing terms suggested, chosen and used in folksonomies is a rich source of information for developing our formal systems so that we can indeed get the best of both worlds. 2 1 Introduction The potential of the Internet to benefit teaching and learning was the catalyst for the creation of the company education.au, and the dynamic advances in information and communication technology (ICT) since then have driven the evolution of the company‘s capability and offerings. As Australia‘s national ICT in education agency, education.au develops and manages national online services for students and educators across all sectors of Australian education. The organisation explores and provides innovative technology solutions and aims to develop connections between the creative edge of new technology and proven practice. This has always been done in a context of collaboration, sharing and networks and therefore the emergence of user contributions to information organisation and management on the web, as exemplified in the development of user tagging and folksonomies, is of great interest. education.au is keen to explore ways in which this new technology and user practice can inform its own services. One potential model is under consideration as a proof of concept development for a project referred to as myedna, a personalised interface to edna.. 3 edna (Education Network Australia) is Australia‘s leading online resource collection and collaborative network for the education and training community. edna is a joint initiative of the state and territory governments and the Australian Government, through their education departments, to provide free news, resources, networks and online tools for educators. edna is managed by education.au limited and has been operating since 1996. Although edna is developed and funded by the Australian education and training sector it is free online for use by anyone interested, including international users. Ownership of groups may not be available to those outside Australia but groups may have international members and edna resources may be searched and retrieved worldwide; many of the tools on the site are also freely available. edna identifies and links to online teaching and learning resources from Australian and international collections, extensive listings of national and international events; online groups, email discussion lists and newsletters; ICT innovations, tools and technologies, including learning objects, RSS feeds, wikis, blogs and podcasts. edna resources are carefully chosen and evaluated by specialised staff and are quality assured and up-to-date. The current edna website provides links to all the above online resources, searchable, categorised in a browse structure and organised within Australian educational sectors. Each resource is also assigned subject index terms by expert indexers using an appropriate thesaurus. All users essentially have the same experience on the website at present and see the same interface to events, resources and news. When they log in to edna Groups or edna Lists, they see their own selection of services. The next stage of development for edna is a project known as myedna which will enable users to personalise the way content from edna and other providers is displayed. However a fully customisable personal learning journey myedna will also allow users to do considerably more than that. 4 We are keen to find a way to involve users in the collection, evaluation and organisation of resources, so that they can customise their usage of edna, share their experiences and tell us through their behaviour and decisions what it is they value and how they want to use it. This matches very closely many of the developments in the Web 2.0 world with the advent of user generated content, online social networks, user tagging and folksonomies. 2 User tagging and folksonomies 2.1 The development of tagging The term Web 2.0, first used by Tim O‘Reilly in 2004, describes a cluster of web- based services with a social collaboration and sharing component, where the community as a whole contributes, takes control, votes and ranks content and contributors. Web 2.0 services include social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, weblogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many- to-many publishing), social software, and folksonomies. Central to this new Web is the idea of tagging — the adding of keywords to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture, audiofile or videoclip) to categorise it. This activity is effectively subject indexing but generally without a controlled vocabulary. Tagging of course is not a new concept, especially to librarians, indexers and classification professionals. What is new is that the tagging is being done by everyone, no longer by only a small group of experts, and that the tags are being made public and shared. The development of the internet and the web, and of search 5 engines, led to users doing their own searching. In the Web 2.0 environment users are now also doing their own content creation and information management. The PEW internet survey of December 2006 (Rainie, 2007) found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorised content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorise online content. Tagging is used in a range of sites for many different types of resources. Tagging is done somewhat differently at different websites, but the following all use some type of user tagging: Blogs (Technorati: http://technorati.com/ ) Bookmarks (Delicious: http://del.icio.us/ ) Books (Librarything: http://www.librarything.com/, Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/) Emails (Gmail: http://mail.google.com/ ) Events (http://www.goingtomeet.com/ ) People (Tagalag: http://www.tagalag.com/ ) Pictures (Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/ ) Podcasts (Odeo: http://odeo.com/ )) Videos (YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ ) Even perhaps tagging of tags? (http://tagtagger.com/ ) In user tagging, after an account has been created a user can apply a tag (or label, or keyword) to a resource; it may be a website, a photograph or video, or a record for a book as in Librarything. 6 The user chooses a tag that is meaningful to him or her. In most sites it has to be a single word – more about that later. A large number of tags can be applied (e.g. in Flickr the maximum number at the time of writing is 75). Once the tags have been assigned, they act as index terms and they may be public or private. When they are public, the tags together can all be searched by all users, creating a ―folksonomy‖. It is important to remember that users have complete freedom in the tags they choose and may assign tags for their own organising purposes, without regard to any other users who may wish to make use of them. Even if this is the case, there may still be valuable information in the collection of tags that develops. In many cases however, users are keen to share their tags and will choose tags that others have also used. Users can add their own tags to already tagged resources. They may use a different word for the same concept or a broader or more specific word for a related concept. The aggregation of all the tags allows a site like Flickr to organise resources better for all users, and also informs the site owners about the popularity of tags and of resources. This can be described as a bottom-up rather than top-down building of categories. Tags, once assigned, can be grouped, shared, displayed, published and managed in several ways. Typically tags are displayed in a ―tag cloud‖ on many sites, where the graphical display indicates by size, font or colour how many times the tag has been used or how many resources have been assigned that tag.